Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

“Maybe he is. Maybe it’s the people he lends his Jeep to. I didn’t want to press it with him until we know more.”

He started the car and they headed down the gravel road to the gate. Bosch rolled his window down. The sky was the color of bleached jeans and the air was invisible and clean and smelled like fresh green peppers. But not for long, Bosch thought. We go back into the nastiness now.

On the way back to the city Bosch cut off the Ventura Freeway and headed south through Malibu Canyon to the Pacific. It would take longer to get back, but the clean air was addictive. He wanted it for as long as possible.

“I want to see the list of the victims,” he said after they had made their way through the winding canyon and the hazy blue surface of the ocean could be seen ahead. “This pedophile you mentioned earlier. Something about that story bothered me. Why would they take the guy’s collection of kiddie porno?”

“Harry, come on, you are not going to suggest that was a reason, that these guys tunneled for weeks and then blasted into a bank vault to steal a collection of kiddie porn?”

“Of course not. But that’s why it raises the question. Why’d they take the stuff?”

“Well, maybe they wanted it. Maybe one was a pedophile and he liked it. Who knows?”

“Or maybe it was all part of a cover. Take everything from every box they drilled to hide the fact that what they were really after was one box. You know, sort of blur the picture by hitting dozens of boxes. But all along the target was something in only one of the boxes. Same principle with the pawnshop break-in: take a lot of jewelry to cover they only wanted the bracelet.

“But with the vault, they wanted something that wouldn’t be reported stolen afterward. Something that couldn’t be reported stolen because it would get the owner into some kind of jam. Like with the pedophile. When his stuff got stolen what could he say? That’s the sort of thing the tunnelers were after, but something more valuable. Something that would make hitting the safe-deposit vault more attractive than hitting the main vault.

“Something that would make killing Meadows a necessity when he endangered the whole caper by pawning the bracelet.”

She was quiet. Bosch looked over at her, but behind her sunglasses she was unreadable.

“Sounds to me like you are talking about drugs again,” she said after a while. “And the dog said no drugs. The DEA found no connections on our list of customers.”

“Maybe drugs, maybe not. But that’s why we should look at the boxholders again. I want to look at the list for myself. Want to see if anything rings a bell with it. The people who reported no losses, they are the ones that I want to start with.”

“I’ll get the list. We’ve got nothing else going anyway.”

“Well, we’ve got these names from Scales to run down,” Bosch said. “I was thinking that we’d pull mugs and take ’ em to Sharkey.”

“Worth a try, I guess. More like just going through the motions.”

“I don’t know. I think the kid is holding something. I think he maybe saw a face that night.”

“I left a memo with Rourke about the hypnosis. He’ll probably get back to us on that today or tomorrow.”

They took the Pacific Coast Highway around the bay. The smog had been blown inland and it was clear enough to see Catalina Island out past the whitecaps. They stopped at Alice’s Restaurant for lunch, and since it was late there was an open table by a window. Wish ordered an ice tea and Bosch had a beer.

“I used to come out to this pier when I was a kid,” Bosch told her. “They’d take a busload of us out. Back then, they had a bait shop out on the end. I’d fish for yellowtail.”

“Kids from DYS?”

“Yeah. Er, no. Back then it was called DPS. Department of Public Services. Few years back they finally realized they needed a whole department for the kids, so they came up with DYS.”

She looked out the restaurant window and down along the pier. She smiled at his memories and he asked where hers were.

“All over,” she said. “My father was in the military. Most I ever spent in one place was a couple years. So my memories aren’t really of places. They’re people.”

“You and your brother were close?” Bosch said.

“Yes, with my father gone a lot. He was always there. Until he enlisted and went away for good.”

Salads were put down on the table and they ate a little bit and small-talked a little bit and then sometime between when the waitress picked up the salad plates and put down the lunch plates she told her brother’s story.

“Every week he’d write me from over there and every week he said he was scared, wanted to come home,” she said. “It wasn’t something he could say to our father or mother. But Michael wasn’t the type. He should never have gone. He went because of our father. He couldn’t let him down. He wasn’t brave enough to say no to him, but he was brave enough to go over there. It doesn’t make sense. Have you ever heard anything so dumb?”

Bosch didn’t answer because he had heard similar stories, his own included. And she seemed to stop there. She either didn’t know what had happened to her brother over there or didn’t want to recount the details.

After a while she said, “Why’d you go?”

He knew the question was coming but in his whole life he had never been able to truthfully answer it, even to himself.

“I don’t know. No choice, I guess. The institutional life, like you said before. I wasn’t going to college. Never really thought about Canada. I think it would have been harder to go there than to just get drafted and go to Vietnam. Then in sixty-eight I sort of won the draft lottery. My number came up so low I knew I was going to go. So I thought I’d outsmart ’em by joining, thought I’d write my own ticket.”

“And so?”

Bosch laughed a little in the same phony way she had laughed before. “I got in, went through basic and all the bullshit and when it came time to choose something, I picked the infantry. I still have never figured out why. They get you at that age, you know? You’re invincible. Once I got over there I volunteered for a tunnel squad. It was kind of like that letter Meadows wrote to Scales. You want to see what you’ve got. You do things you’ll never understand. You know what I mean?”

“I think so,” she said. “What about Meadows? He had chances to leave and he never did, not till the very end. Why would anybody want to stay if they didn’t have to?”

“There were a lot like that,” Bosch said. “I guess it wasn’t usual or unusual. Some just didn’t want to leave that place. Meadows was one of them. It might have been a business decision, too.”

“You mean drugs?”

“Well, I know he was using heroin while he was there. We know he was using and selling afterward when he got back here. So maybe when he was over there he got involved in moving it and he didn’t want to leave a good thing. There is a lot that points to it. He was moved to Saigon after they took him out of the tunnels. Saigon would have been the place to be, especially with embassy clearance like he had as an MP. Saigon was sin city. Whores, hash, heroin, it was a free market. A lot of people jumped into it. Heroin would have made him some nice money, especially if he had a plan, a way to move some of the stuff back here.”

She pushed pieces of red snapper she wasn’t going to eat around on her plate with a fork.

“It’s unfair,” she said. “He didn’t want to come back. Some boys wanted to come home but never got the chance.”

“Yes. There was nothing fair about that place.”

Bosch turned and looked out the window at the ocean. There were four surfers in bright wet suits riding on the swells.